Framing Your Message

Framing Your Message
Help your reader get the picture...

Make your communication more effective but paying attention to more than vocabulary and grammar.

By filtering out distractions and barriers to effective communication, some writing techniques ensure that your message is received as sent. Plain language process also produces content that is easily accessed. One way this can be assured is framing your message.

In-text message framing uses word or phrase "frames" that situate your message in a context as an aid to comprehension. Framing creates a structure or framework to hang your message on. A good frame is the underpinning that helps your message get built and stay built. Words or strings of words that are used to define, repeat or reinforce your message are called in-text framing... Read the full article

"F" is for links

F is for lazy? Here a some links.

Foreign

"The language of law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it."

- Judge Learned Hand

thanks to the legal writing prof

Feedback

Feedback technique: Stop, Start, Continue

from Genuine Curiosity

Giving & Receiving Feedback

from Leadership for Lawyers

Employee Engagement

Another "E" post before the week is gone... I want to share this post from David Zinger--mostly for the poem by Moshe Safdie!

Employee Engagement Extra: Making Projects Unique

By David Zinger on Employee Engagement

Welcome to the Employee Engagement Extra.

I encourage you to watch Moshe Safdie talk about what makes a building unique. I encourage you to think through Mr. Safdie’s experience with buildings for the employee engagement you may be working at building in your organization. View the 17 minute video by clicking on the screen below or by clicking here to go to the TED Site.

Mr. Safdie concludes the video with the following poem he wrote:

He who seeks truth shall find beauty
He who seeks beauty shall find vanity

He who seeks order shall find gratification
He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed

He who considers himself a servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self expression
He who seeks self expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance

Arrogance is incompatible with nature
Through nature the nature of the universe and the nature of man we shall seek truth
If we seek truth we shall find beauty

~ Moshe Safdie

E is for efficient, effective, economical writing

Plain language techniques can help you get the message through efficiently and effectively. It takes effort but it’s worth it.

Poorly written documents contribute to inefficiencies, management problems, higher administrative costs, and poor public relations. Clear communication gives you a positive image as efficient, responsive, and friendly. Isn't that how you want your clients to see you?

Improving your writing saves both time and money. Think of the time spent writing and editing. And the time wasted correcting misunderstandings. Imagine the gains to be achieved by making your written material more efficient and effective.

One of my clients prized brevity above all and insisted that all staff memos be limited to one page. But sometimes clarity requires more text or more space, and clarity is what we are really after.

A few weeks ago, Kenneth W. Davis put it this way:

Be economical

Some trainers and textbooks talk about conciseness or brevity. I prefer the word economy. It suggests dollars, pounds, and euros, and reminds us that business is about money. As someone once said, in the game of business, money is how we keep score. This week, as you revise your drafts, look for ways to save money, especially by making smaller demands on your readers' time.

D is for drafting, legal drafting

What is legal drafting? It involves writing that deals with rights and responsibilities in the form of contracts, deeds, and such. Legislative drafting is a segment of it that deals with writing laws.

Wayne Schiess, on his blog in 2005, said legal drafting is an independent area of expertise [http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/wschiess/legalwriting/2005/10/you-must-actually-study-legal-drafting.html]. To show that you need more than a law degree, he offered this little quiz.

How much do you really know about legal drafting? Here's a short quiz:

1. Name a text on legal drafting.
   
   
2. What is the proper legal-drafting definition of shall?
   
   
3. What is the difference between writing "such activities" and "those activities"?
   
   
4. Why do drafters write "Four Hundred and no 100s dollars ($400.00)" and do they need to double-up that way?
   
   
5. Explain the drafting problem in this sentence: "The rule applies to associations and corporations with offices in Texas."

I can answer these questions; and I used to teach legal drafting a decade ago. But I don't do it alone any more. Now I only team teach drafting with a practicing lawyer in the area of law concerned. Because the nuances of legal drafting change with the substrata of the governing law in a legal practice area.

I have worked as a consultant with a law firm to produce plain language contracts and so on. But I wish the firms would take this on directly--producing client documentation in plain legal language. It involves too much back-and-forth negotiation over words and grammar and stops being fun for me.

Do you know a law firm that works with plain legal language?

Here's a thought

from the Christian Monitor and the Washington Post

We're on information overload

Kids can't focus these days, and neither can I.

By Thomas Washington

from the February 6, 2008 edition

As a school librarian, I wind up reading all sorts of damning reports on students' lack of reading skills... But despite the ominous reports, it's business as usual for students today, at least the ones I'm talking to. So what gives?

Educators or parents might start by framing the questions differently. Who isn't having trouble concentrating these days? Who doesn't find it nearly impossible to stick with a 450-page novel?

... I suspect that the tipping point in information overload has tipped. Students' aversion to reading does not necessarily signal a weakness, much less a dislike of reading. For them, and now maybe for me, moving on to something else is an adaptive tactic for negotiating the jungle that is our information-besotted culture of verbiage.

These kids manage to survive by bushwhacking through the muddle – while seamlessly dealing with an e-mail, a Word document, or a 50-page PDF from the scholarly database JSTOR. It's taken them just a few years to arrive at the same conclusion that I've reached after a lifetime of sustained reading: The pursuit of knowledge in the age of information overload is less about a process of acquisition than about proficiency in tossing stuff out. By necessity, we spend more time quickly scanning manuals, king-size novels, the blogosphere, and poems in The New Yorker than we do scrutinizing their contents for deeper meaning.

This is the price we pay for the changed demands in reading. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff defines this new reading terrain as "the paradox of our age." We've grown into a culture of searchers, not readers. "Surely, we have never read, or written, so many words a day," Schiff writes. "Yet increasingly we deal in atomized bits of information, the hors d'oeuvres of education."

... Living in the era of information overload forces a few key questions on all readers. What do we need to know? Why do we need to know it? And, given that by the end of our lives we will have absorbed and converted to knowledge only a sliver of the information available, should we bother knowing it?

• Thomas Washington is head librarian at the Potomac School in McLean, Va.©2008 The Washington Post.

C is for Consent

The Wall Street Journal report "The Informed Patient" starts with this unsurprising info:
"Informed consent may be the biggest misnomer in medicine: Studies show that most patients don't read the forms they sign before undergoing surgery or medical treatment. More than half of those who do read the forms don't understand them, and only a quarter of forms include all of the data patients need to make an informed decision."